Alaska 2008

Tonight is our last night on the road... at least for this trip. Today's was one of the longest driving days we had since the first two days on the road. The trip was relatively uneventful... all but about four miles were on I-80. The Indiana and Ohio portions of the trip were on relatively flat terrain and once we got into Pennsylvania the road was hilly. Weather wise, it was OK except for some pretty heavy rains during a thunderstorm in Ohio. On arrival in Bellefonte, we could hear the rumble of thunder and see some pretty ominous clouds. There was a severe thunderstorm warning issued by the National Weather Service for this area, but we got lucky and only got a little rain. The more severe weather passed about 10 miles north of us. The forecast for tonight is for scattered thunderstorm... hopefully, they will miss us too.

We are now only 280 miles from home. Considering that we were in the campground by 2:45, we could have made the remainder of the trip today. We chose not to do so for two reasons. First, while I have driven 700 mile days in the past, I would prefer not to do so if I didn't need to. The second reason has to do with the operating hours of the trailer storage area. They close their gate at 6 PM but you can still get in by entering a personal code into the keypad at the gate. The keypad is disabled at 8 PM and you can't get in or out. It doesn't function again until 6 AM. If we continued on to the storage area, we would have a relatively narrow margin to get things done. If we encountered heavier han usual traffic enroute to the storage facility, we may not have enough time to unhook the trailer and transfer things that we need to take home into the truck before we are locked in. We have used the Bellefonte campground three time in the last four years as our last stop and we generally get home by early afternoon and don't have to worry about getting stuck in traffic or in the storage facility.